you got it all too young, see.

January 31, 2013

What happened was, you got it all too young, see.

You thought that was how life was supposed to go, you know, save up some cash and fill up a few trunks full of quilts and cutlery. Then your husband gets a profession advertising to the impressionable for the untouchable while you get to go to school for a luxury pseudo-science that most of America cannot afford, and you come home and cry because you’d rather see the Grand Canyon than your white picket privacy fence. Maybe you thought you’d earned it. Maybe you didn’t appreciate it enough. Maybe you thought you deserved it more than others who were ten years your senior with little mouths to feed who couldn’t make ends meet with Faded Glory jeans and hot dog dinners. You wouldn’t be caught dead in a single-wide and dirt drive. You rolled your eyes at phone books used as furniture, matted orange carpet from the 1970’s, plastic window blinds and the staples that hold the walls in place. Somehow you skipped all the coming-of-age struggles, roach-infested apartments and living off of Ramen noodles. You bypassed the rags, and were comfortable in the riches. Owning a townhome at 21, you had two too many bedrooms and more bathrooms than people living there. You wiped the dogs’ feet with baby wipes when they came in from the yard, since there was no baby to soil the carpet. You could afford to pick out your car based on how it looked rather than how it ran, and you STILL wrinkled your nose at having to get the oil and filter changed. Mechanical maintenance seemed trivial, just like words like “escrow,” “equity,” and “excise tax.” Words like “design,” “plush,” and “contemporary” you paid for, handsomely. You purchased things you did not believe to have a purpose, and cleaned since there was nothing else pressing to do. You cleaned base boards, dusted the tippy top of bookcases and ceiling fans even when it wasn’t Spring. Relatives twice your age came to your house for Thanksgiving since your kitchen had more space and trendier cooking gadgets which were typically neglected in choice of delivery menus. You just didn’t know what you had, you see, you got it all too young. If there was anything worse than knowing someone else’s hair was down the drain of the tub you were sitting in, you didn’t know it. If there was anything rare about being the first to shower, first to spit, first to own that bathroom, you didn’t know it. If there was anything lucky about your seamless and unroacky rise to adulthood, you didn’t know it. And you got tired of your mindful glances to the Joneses, of the spic and the span, of the latest and the greatest. There was so much you didn’t know since you got it all too young, you see. You cried over having to try so hard and not being able to see the Grand Canyon past your white picket privacy fence. Very much like how you’re crying right now.